> There's quite a bit of pie-in-the-sky here, but I've had an idea that I'd

On the contrary - 1.0 was released last December... :-)

> like to share.[snip]> So anything that is designed to streamline what a user must download> ("user" in this case representing a kernel non-developer) must have> near-zero impact on the existing development process. It must be invisible> and transparent.

It is.

> This need not be an all-singing, all dancing tool right from the get-go> either. In fact, I think a first kick at this cat might have only one user> option - arch. That alone would reduce download sizes and required storage> by a factor of however many main arches there are right now - 6? 7?. Later> versions could be kept general: "I have a SCSI card" "I have a network> card" "I want sound support" as opposed to "I have an Adaptec Model> 8000-K1WqA".

Buildkernel 1.0 already does this; it deletes all architectures(linux/arch/X and linux/include/asm-X) except the one it's currentlyrunning on. To be sure, until I put in a switch to disable this,Buildkernel is not useful for cross-compiling, but I doubt anyone woulduse it for cross-compiling anyways. Sparc and Sparc64 are intertwined; both trees are kept if buildingfor either sparc architecture. Additionally, there's a report I'm lookinginto about ppc; it appears to require some m68k files.

> However, I worry that the current src tree may not be organized that> rigidly, that there may be cross-directory dependancies that cannot be> inferred from a given source code file's position in the filesystem. If

Rather likely, I think. That's what makes this project fun foryou! If you'd like to pursue this from a userspace perspective (asyour chances of shuffling files around in the source tree for solely thisreason are roughly equivalent to your chances of simultaneously becomingpresident and being struck by lightning :-), I'd gladly consider addingyour patches to intelligently remove unneeded code. There are all kindsof possibilities; a good starting point might be removing support for bustypes that do not work on a given architecture. Cheers, - Bill